Train To Busan

Train to Busan (Busanhaeng) (2016)

Runtime: 118 minutes

Directed by: Yeon Sang-Ho

Starring: Gong Yoo, Ma Dong-Seok, Jung Yoo-Mi, Choi Woo-Shik, Ahn So-Hee

From: Several different South Koran companies

Tuesday night I rewatched the 4th and 5th Friday the 13th movies. I talked about them before here so I won't say more about those; yesterday I went to Tampa to see this on the big screen at Studio Movie Grill, a joint I had never been to before. Things did not turn out well... and yet this was still a great film. I talk all about it below: 

In a rare moment for me, I actually got to see this movie on the big screen last night. Nevermind being able to see two South Korean flicks on the big screen in a two week span of time, I was excited to check this out as I heard rave reviews. I am glad I got to see it that way but boy was it a bad night at the movies.

I'll try to be brief: I saw this at Studio Movie Grill, a place I had never visited before and as it was the only joint in the area showing it, I made the drive to Tampa to check it out. After visiting a few places I ended up at the run-down mall where it was. The fact that it was not clear where you should park so you could be by the main entrance and it was difficult to get out of there in a dark parking lot... that did not make me happy, nor did the bartender in the fancy lounge/bar area ignoring me make me feel like I made the right choice in going there. My seat being beat up all to hell, various things not being adequately explained and what ended up happening during the film means that it would take a lot for me to ever go there again.

But hey, their pizza was great so if you do decide to go to one of their 20 or so locations...

The movie drew a decent-sized crowd and most of them were fine; they reacted to all the big moments so it was all good... thankfully I usually don't have to deal with awful Troglodytes when at a theatre seeing a movie. Well, on this night there were some real cretins around. I'll just say that I am not a confrontational person yet I almost had a confrontation with a couple. They bolted as soon as the end credits began and I thought about running after them; then I realized that the guy looked like a Neanderthal who solves all his problems with his fists so I decided that it'd probably be best if I restrained myself.

The big tragedy of it is, I had this fiasco of a night while watching a great movie, one I recommend to everyone. I hope that when my mutuals see this in the future, it is under better circumstances than what I had to deal with. This is all about a zombie apocalypse happening in South Korea, and the focus is on a disparate group of people on a train who are traveling from Seoul to the city of Busan; the former is in the north part of the country and Busan is down at the very bottom. As they go through the country things escalate rather quickly when the zombie infection spreads onto the train. Now, they are the fast-moving zombie types and infection happens very quickly so it can certainly be argued that maybe they aren't zombies at all and instead they're just infected, like the creatures we saw in Nightmare City and Planet Terror.

In any case, the key aspect of the film is not all the exciting action sequences or seeing giant hordes of zombies wrecking s***. Rather, it's all the characters you follow. We get to follow them. They include a businessman father who is finally spending time with his young daughter... an old pair of sisters, a cocky young man and his pregnant wife, and a baseball team. We get to see how they react to something unprecedented and while some decide to work together to try and survive, others are real A-holes. It's all so compelling and interesting; while some of the characters are stereotypical all of them I enjoyed watching and judging by reactions, so did the crowd. I doubt it's too much of a spoiler to say that in a South Korean picture, things aren't cliché like we get in Hollywood movies and thus you should not necessarily presume that all of the main characters will make it to the end.

Personally, I was not a fan of Snowpiercer at all and I thought this was much better. One day I'll watch this at home, where the experience will be much better; I'll also see Seoul Station, an animated movie from the same director that is apparently a prequel to this. I will hope it is as great as this movie turned out to be.